Election fever

The election campaign in Turkey begins in a febrile atmosphere

UNTIL a few weeks ago, Mehmet Simsek, a British-educated economist, earned a six-figure salary as a banker in London. But he has dropped all that to run as a parliamentary candidate for the ruling AK Party in Gaziantep, which borders Syria. He is standing “because I want to serve my country,” he says.

Born into grinding poverty in Batman, a mainly Kurdish town, Mr Simsek did not speak Turkish until he was six. Yet he then clawed his way to success. He is the poster boy of the 150 new candidates whom the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is fielding in the July 22nd election. His presence thins out the religious firebrands within the mildly Islamist AK ranks.

Turkey's meddlesome generals are not impressed. Having hinted at a possible coup in late April, they remain eager to stop Mr Erdogan returning to power alone. Indeed, in some ways, the contest is now between AK and the army. “The military hates AK, and that's the foundation of everything,” says one Western diplomat. But opinion polls suggest that Mr Erdogan's party may do better than the 34% it took in the 2002 election.

The secularist opposition is fragmented. A planned merger of the conservative True Path Party with the centre-right Motherland Party collapsed amid bickering over numbers of candidates from each side. A survey commissioned by AK suggests that the main secularist CHP opposition party may get 22%; and the ultra-nationalist MHP, 11%.

At least 30 candidates from the pro-Kurdish DTP are also expected to win seats; the Kurds have fielded 40 independents to get round the minimum 10% threshold for parties to have parliamentary representation. No other party is likely to get in, so AK might well be able again to form a government alone, says a top party official. “That is, if the elections take place at all,” he adds gloomily.

Yet Armagan Kuloglu, a retired air-force general, insists that, as long as AK picks a “reasonable” presidential candidate (meaning one whose wife does not wear an Islamic headscarf) to replace Ahmet Necdet Sezer, things will return to normal. It was Mr Erdogan's nomination of his foreign minister, Abdullah Gul (whose wife wears the headscarf) to succeed Mr Sezer that prompted the generals' threat to intervene on April 27th. A defiant AK responded by ramming through a law to allow a direct election of the president. This law was quashed by Mr Sezer. Few believe it will get past the constitutional court, which extraordinarily ruled invalid parliament's attempt to elect Mr Gul.

Some even fear that the court may now be tempted to launch proceedings to ban AK on the grounds that it is steering Turkey towards religious rule. For the time being, though, the opposition's strategy is to play on mounting public fury in the face of stepped-up PKK rebel attacks that have claimed the lives of dozens of Turkish soldiers in recent months.

On June 8th the army exhorted the Turkish public to exert its “popular reflexes” to counter terrorist threats. The call posted on the general staff website was seen by some as an invitation to attack the Kurds. This forced the generals to explain that they wanted the national resolve to be expressed through strictly peaceful means.

Meanwhile, Mr Erdogan is resisting pressure to order a cross-border operation against PKK bases in northern Iraq. This has enabled his critics to portray him as an American stooge. Crowds at the recent spate of funerals of Turkish soldiers killed in battle have taken to booing Mr Erdogan and any cabinet members who dare to show up. Mr Simsek may soon be yearning for his cushy London life again.